Introducing the Open Source Lounge

Recently I worked with a couple of our Braintree developers, Brian Lesperance and Scott Parker, to create a new way to engage by way of conference sponsorship. The blog post details our latest efforts to support development we believe in and get out and about in the midwest community we love. Scott provided the words for this post but I provided the sweet cheese curd (and other) photo(s).

Open source software is the foundation upon which many companies, ours included, are built. Too often we don’t take the time to give back to these projects that we rely upon. Some people are too busy, some are unsure what to do, and some are nervous about making their first public commit.

At Braintree, we love open source and we love supporting interesting tech conferences so we combined the two with an event we’re calling the Open Source Lounge. The idea is simple - get open source maintainers and potential contributors together during the “hallway track” at a conference to sit down and give back to these projects.

Madison+ Ruby was the perfect opportunity to try this out. It’s a conference that deliberately combines great technical content with a number of talks encouraging you to think differently about software. Together with their help, we gathered some open source maintainers, loaded up a couple of cars with computer hardware, and made the trip to the land of cheese.

Over the course of two days, we managed to help a number of people make their first commit back to open source. With the combined forces of our Braintree developers, our new committers, and our awesome volunteer maintainers we made contributions to a number of different projects like PDFKit, Rack, HTTParty, and Loofah amongst others.

About a dozen commits and at least as many cheese curds later, we helped a number of people jump into open source with both feet. We had a great time at Madison+ Ruby with the Open Source Lounge and plan to bring it to a conference near you. If you’re a conference organizer and want to bring the Open Source Lounge to your next event, please let us know. If you’re a developer who would love to help make the Open Source Lounge a reality while you power world-class payments as well, we’d love for you to join us.

See you soon at a conference near you! Thanks to our amazing maintainers Mike Delessio, Ian Cordasco, Hiro Asari, and Brian Shirai for their participation. Many thanks to Jim and Jen Remsik and the Madison+ Ruby team for letting us try something different.

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Lindsay VerstegenLindsay leads Recruiting + People Ops at Braintree–first figuring out what Braintree even was in 2012. Likes: bikes, photos, yoga, handwritten letters, and home-brewed kombucha. More posts by this author